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During my decade-plus stint at my old job, there was a mounting fear, one that would creep up on me at movie screenings and at film festivals—a shiver of dread suddenly cooling a warm Cannes night, something sharp and frightening glinting ominously in Park City snow. It was the conviction that when my miraculous ride inevitably ended, I’d have no idea who I was. Or, really, that I wouldn’t be anybody at all. I had been warned, had warned myself, have warned others to not let careerism grab hold too tightly, to try to make life and work as separate as they can be. But that is awfully difficult, especially when your work is something you love to do, and it involves creativity and subjectivity, and it is rarefied—hard to obtain and hard to hold onto. 

I am probably guiltier than most people of starting conversations with strangers with, “What do you do?” Not because I ever wanted to brag about myself, about the fancy magazine I worked for, but because to me the answer to that question was the quickest route to definition; I thought it explained a lot about a person in easy to parse shorthand. And thus the more I thought that of others, the more I thought it about myself. Yes, I had my private little passions, my quotidian habits that were not reflected in my professional output. But so much of me was my job, for a very long time. 

In my defense, I was aware that it was a mistake to be this way, that it was building a sense of self on top of a pretty rickety foundation, one whose integrity I actually had very little control over. I knew that someday something would shift terribly and down I’d go. The prospect was terrifying, almost impossible to actually imagine. And yet I was convinced that it was true. What life could ever await me past this all-consuming, definitional fact of myself, this billboard of my accomplishments that I could point to in my many moments of self-doubt, on the too many nights I spent peering with longing and envy at the Instagram lives of others? At least I had this one big thing, a mark of status and belonging to refer to as proof of something like worth. 

It was surprising, then, that on the day it did finally get taken away, the most immediate feeling I had was relief. Partly because there was an acute creative difference between myself and the people running things. But more so because the worst news imaginable (career-wise, at least) had been delivered and there I was, nodding on the Zoom call and asking questions about severance (which certainly helped soften the blow considerably) and then hanging up and texting a few people and realizing that, well, I had not spontaneously combusted or disintegrated into a cloud of atoms. I was still there, still mostly me, albeit now a person who suddenly—for the first time since I was 30 years old, really—had a lot to figure out. 

That process, which is by no means over, has not been easy. But it has not been agonizing, either. Because, yes, I am very fortunate in many ways: I had a financial cushion, an array of contacts to reach out to, supportive loved ones encouraging me along. Still, I had plenty of days this fall when I felt stitched to the couch, unable to move and not terribly interested in trying. There were other days when I felt sort of drunk and mad with possibility; an almost manic ambition would seize me and suddenly I could see the completed whole of a novel or a script vivid in my mind. (Where they sadly are still relegated.) I took some work-related trips, some amiably busy, others lonely and listless. I did a fair amount of freelance writing which proved fulfilling—I got to review theater for the first time in a long time, I reveled in the neatness of being assigned a specific thing and delivering on that discrete task. 

It has, essentially, been totally unlike what I was afraid of for all those years. There was no complete collapse, no existential annihilation. It was mostly some mild depression and boredom (and righteous anger!) interrupted by flurries of hope and work and planning for whatever might come next. You are reading this, so that is one of those plans made manifest, and I’m so grateful that you’re here. I have a podcast, Critical Darlings, launching on January 1 (tomorrow!), and I hope you’ll give that a listen. (It will live on the Blank Check podcast feed for now, so go look for it there.) All told, I am altered but okay.  

One of the more significant changes I’ve experienced in the last few months is how I’ve approached movies and TV, a longstanding personal interest that eventually became a professional one. That can be a ruinous thing. There can come a point when it all feels like obligation, rather than passion: trudging up to Lincoln Square for another franchise movie, aimlessly watching screener after screener of shows you’ll never finish. It all blends together into a colorless soup, peppered only occasionally by a flash of brilliance. 

This fall, though, much of that professional onus went away. I was free to see Wake Up Dead Man or not, to check out Pluribus or ignore it entirely. What a joy it was, then, to interact with them as a matter of choice, to give time to things only because I really wanted to. I don’t necessarily think it has made me like anything more than I would have if I saw it for work—I’m sorry, but Frankenstein is bad in any timeline—but it has softened my perspective in some welcome ways. I am less alert to potential angles and talking points, there is not the same constant running dialogue in my head about what this movie or that show means in the larger context of the industry. I certainly don’t want to lose that awareness entirely; I plan to write about such things here, to talk about them on the podcast, etc. But for a few months at least, it was a nice change of pace to simply be a consumer again, to have a more relaxed and fluid approach to what are (sadly or not) my favorite pastimes. 

Which has, in a funny way, made me more excited to write about them professionally. Maybe I’m caught in a loop, and a few years from now I’ll be right back to feeling jaded and disengaged. But that’s sort of pessimistic, and pessimism is not what we do on December 31. (Well, we try not to, anyway.) So instead I’ll posit that maybe I will find another path, one that involves the work of analysis and dissection and deadlines and embargoes and all that, but somehow doesn’t smother the simple pleasure of watching something new. 

This is all a long way of saying that I am trying to look at change—even change I didn’t choose—as an opportunity. To see things another way, to challenge myself, to again and again fall back in love with the art that has meant so much to me for so long. I may still worry about box office numbers and studio mergers and the persistent clawing of social media tearing away at our attention spans—to say nothing of the shakiness of making a living as a writer. It is impossible to enjoy anything in a total vacuum. Just as it is impossible to predict the future of one’s career, of one’s life. But we can at least allow room for optimism, here at the very end of one year and, quite soon, the beginning of a new one. To stay open to the possibility of the happiest kind of surprise, when something proves much better than you once feared—and, of course, to be grateful that we’re still here to experience it at all.

Happy New Year, dear readers. May 2026 bring many wonderful and exciting things your way.